


Left As Ghosts

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 02:05:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Pyralspite, which can probably read her mind, edges toward the surface of her skin. If it wants a fight, she can't stop it. This is the deal, and Terezi Pyrope has never been an oathbreaker. She isn't going to become one for the likes of Vriska.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left As Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seaweedie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaweedie/gifts).



> Essentially: a re-imagining of Make Her Pay, now with 1000x more magical tattoos. This owes a great deal to Marjorie M. Liu's "Hunter Kiss" books.

It's been months since she's had time to get Pyralspite a touch-up. It coils up, as choate as it can manage and as compact, and Terezi takes off her shirt and presents her back for Kanaya Maryam's inspection. "You've been overusing this," Kanaya says. Pyralspite takes its sacrifices in _ink_ and _blood_. Kanaya is not the best in the city, but she learned from the best, and she's the one Terezi can fit into her budget. 

"Yes," Terezi admits. The bone needle, whittled down from a single troll femur, is poised, thrumming, centimeters from the edge of Pyralspite's tail. "Business has been good!"

"There are holes in the lining of your coat. That was excellent leather, once." The needle makes its first contact, on the very tip of the tail. If Terezi doesn't speak, Kanaya will keep talking--about her customers, about her designs, about improvements to the model of ensorcelled swordcane that Terezi has been saving up for--and that, _that_ is what she's here for. A wall of chatter. They both know it. 

Instead: "Have you seen Karkat lately?" Kanaya says. She moves up Pyralspite's spine, stretching the skin taut and holding it in place with manicured nails that prick Terezi's flesh only where it isn't covered by the tattoo. 

"Does he have something I need to know?" Terezi asks. Pyralspite is cramped like this, and it communicates its disapproval directly to the joints in Terezi's knees. She smiles through it, into the mirror at Kanaya: _And is this something going to get me paid!_

Kanaya reeks like someone scrambling to come up with an appropriate lie. "I think you should talk to him," she says. Her hands, steady enough for the fine needlework that Terezi can only touch and imagine, waver.

"I felt that," says Terezi. Kanaya stops. She pulls the needle away and sits very straight on her stool, head held high, the _more elegant and dignified than you_ posture. Most often, she is. Most often, Terezi is not cowed, not even by the graceful curve of Kanaya's wrist, frozen in midair as though suspended from a string--it's calculated, but only for _visual_ impact. Pyralspite twitches at the interruption. "I made a marvelous discovery this week," Terezi continues, "it's called the 'direct approach.'" 

"I've heard of it," Kanaya says. "Once or twice. I've never been a fan." 

"A-ha." Terezi taps her fingers on the back of the chair she's straddling. "The only reason you'd have for being this evasive--" 

Kanaya brings the needle back down with a vengeance, starting in on the individual scales: Pyralspite's favorite, Terezi's least. "Is Vriska," she says, "yes. Please don't move."

\- - -

Once killed, Aradia stayed dead for all of five minutes. Terezi does not have the eyes to see what she looks like these days, and she is glad of it!--but walking into Aradia's one-room apartment, the first smell is always of rot. No one is sure whether Aradia is entirely corporeal, not even Kanaya, who hasn't had her own blood running in her veins in sweeps. No one wants to touch Aradia and find out.

"I've seen her," Aradia says. "The ones at the gates told me when she entered the city."

"That easy?" Terezi asks. She makes her way across the floor without difficulty: nothing ever moves in this place, unless Sollux comes around to clean. There is not much to clean. 

"I've paid the blood-price." Sweeps ago, Aradia would have said it with a grin and a wink, because to necromancers these things are _funny_ \--more so to lowbloods, whose lives are brief and whose awareness of this brevity is accompanied by a tissue-deep understanding of its accompanying cheapness. Terezi does not see a great many highblood corpsetalkers in her line of work. 

The last thing Terezi remembers seeing was the pool of blue on the ground at Vriska's feet. There were less sweet sights in the world, and if even if Vriska hadn't crawled off into a hole to die of her wounds, she would have been in pain for a very long time. Aradia doesn't think about these things. Aradia is without bitterness or hate. Aradia is, of the four of them, the only one currently a reanimated corpse, and does not get to sit on the feelings jury.

"She'll come to visit me first," Aradia says, "to gloat, probably." 

"She'll think it's gloating," Terezi says. 

Aradia made a wide, expansive, meaningless gesture, something she's learned to do to seem more alive. It only works some of the time. "And I won't give her the fight she wants."

Only Terezi can do that. Pyralspite curls around her neck and crawls under her hairline in anticipation.

\- - -

Pyralspite can't restore her sight, but just as it's Terezi's armor when it's quiescent, it can more than augment her. It remembers the taste of Vriska's blood and stirs where it's stretched out, along her arm and halfway over her chest; cobalt explodes on Terezi's tongue. A highblood bleeds out slowly, in pulses rather than in gouts. First Pyralspite pulled off Vriska's arm, and then it hovered over her, watching her gape. It had taken her eight-pupiled eye between its teeth, plucked it out, and swallowed it.

"Man," Vriska had said. She'd wiped a smear of blood from the side of her face, like she had ever cared what she looked like. "If all you were going to do was hurt me and run me out of town, you should've just stabbed me or something." She'd shrugged, testing out the gesture lighter an arm. "Your mistake."

Her new arm is a work of _art_. It either cost a fortune, or she extorted someone incredibly talented into building it for her. Either-or! There's no telling, with Vriska Serket. Terezi meets her in a park, and brings weedy, nondescript, nerdfaced psionic backup that Vriska can only control half of the time, and if they're both lucky, won't notice until it's too late. 

Vriska sits heavily and kicks her feet out, like she's looking for a place to put them up. "Sollux didn't even make _one_ lame 'Vriska Circuit' joke when I said hi to him," she says. "It's like he's mad at me or something!"

Terezi should know better than to count on luck around Vriska. "Half of the city is mad at you," she says. "Half the city has been mad at you since you _pupated._ "

"Go ahead." The lake is still enough for Terezi to be able to smell the pink moon's reflection in the water, and to know that when Vriska tosses a stone with her metal arm, it hits dead center. "Ask me why I came back."

"To beg my forgiveness, and Aradia's, and Tavros's? Why do you do anything, Vriska? For--"

"--'for money? For yourself? To get your kicks?'" Vriska finishes for her, and does she really sound that screechy? Pyralspite, which can probably read her mind, edges toward the surface of her skin. If it wants a fight, she can't stop it. This is the deal, and Terezi Pyrope has never been an oathbreaker. She isn't going to become one for the likes of Vriska.

Vriska stands up. A poor choice: she's hiding bruises under her clothes, and badly. It slows her down enough to give Terezi an advantage, if she wants it.

Terezi doesn't want it. With Pyralspite tugging at her, she walks away.

\- - -

"She's going to come looking for you," Kanaya says. She's in head-to-toe green tonight--no red, no black--Terezi has her tattoo, and Kanaya has her colors. 

"She doesn't want a war," says Terezi. She runs her hand over an embroidery hoop and ends up fiddling with a heap of crushed velvet. It is completely awful, and someone must have left it there to mess with her. "She wouldn't win! She just wants to tie up her loose ends."

"And what does that entail?" This is Kanaya's ashen wet dream. The bruises were the wrong size and shape to have been made by Kanaya's hands, too compact, too well-aimed, and in any event Kanaya likes her fights like she likes her sexual encounters: brief, and with a large, whirring gadget involved. Not Tavros. Aradia, then. 

"Destruction of property, and being thrown out of bars until one of us has to bail her out, most likely," Terezi says. "It will be you, because she knows you can't help yourself." Narrowed eyes do not work on the blind. She doesn't know why Kanaya even bothers. "And then you take her to your hive and rub salve on her bruises, and you shack up until Vriska and I have our grand showdown."

"Oh?" _Tone_ works. Purposefully mild, genuine curiosity mixed with the promise of real anger. Terezi has long learned not to let Kanaya see her flinch.

"I'm just telling you how _she_ thinks it will happen! So that we can circumvent her more easily."

"Is that what she thinks," Kanaya says, "or is that what you want?"

Terezi fists her hand in the velvet, considers throwing it. She doesn't. She is not a wiggler, and besides, she needs Kanaya in the practical, serviceable way she never needed Vriska. Kanaya sweeps into the back of her shop to, perhaps, refresh a ward or have a quick blood tipple; Terezi is free to stay as long as she likes, but only until Vriska comes knocking. She's never wrong about these things. On the back of her right knee, Pyralspite flicks its freshly inked tail and gives a rare cackle in the back of her head, then settles in to wait, too.


End file.
